Don’t sweat the slow start. Andrew Wiggins has arrived on the NBA landscape, and he’s not going anywhere.

By Michael Grange in Minneapolis

t’s still two hours until game time, but on the floor of the target center, class is in session.

Presiding is Minnesota Timberwolves assistant coach Sam Mitchell, who spent 13 journeyman seasons in the NBA perfecting his (mostly) good-humoured chops-busting before moving on to coaching, where he now does it for a living. Attending is Andrew Wiggins, the Toronto kid and NBA rookie who is the T-Wolves’ cornerstone as the franchise tries to rebuild after 10 years outside the playoffs, the longest streak in the league and one that won’t end this season given their firm grip on the bottom spot in the Western Conference after 49 games. “You’re supposed to be a stopper,” begins Mitchell. Wiggins’s normally placid face cracks into a wide grin. He’s been here before, he knows what’s coming. One of Mitchell’s greatest gifts is for telling hard truths while leaving most people laughing, and Minnesota’s young superstar-to-be knows that when it starts, there’s nowhere to hide. “He’s a fun guy to be around,” says Wiggins, who remembers watching Mitchell’s sharp-tongued ways from afar when he was head coach of the Toronto Raptors from 2003 until midway through the 2008–09 season. “It’s all in fun. It’s all love.”

On this night, Wiggins will be guarding 10-year veteran and two-time all-star Luol Deng of the Miami Heat, another in the long line of elite talents he’s matching up with as he makes his way through the league in his age-19 season. By way of motivation, Mitchell is reminding Wiggins—who is projected to have as much of an impact defensively as offensively based on his shocking quickness and spidery, six-foot-eight frame—of how some of his recent battles have turned out: Some guy named LeBron James scored 16 of his 36 points on him in the fourth quarter a few nights before. Then Chandler Parsons, a clever small forward with the Dallas Mavericks, broke out for 11 points in the third quarter two nights later. The Timberwolves lost both games. “You’re supposed to be a stopper,” says Mitchell again. With his coach putting him on blast, now doesn’t seem like the time for Wiggins to bring up the career-high 33 points he hung on James, or that his 10 second-half points against Dallas keyed a T-Wolves comeback that fell just short. Mitchell wants an answer. What is Wiggins going to do tonight to make sure he doesn’t get it handed to him again? Wiggins is laughing, so he couldn’t get a word out if he tried. But Mitchell’s last question hangs in the air like a high-arcing jump shot: “What are you going to do?”

Making it to the NBA was never an issue for Wiggins. It’s always been: What was he going to do when he got there? His arrival as the No. 1 pick in the 2014 draft always had an air of inevitability to it. That’s what happens when your dad, Mitch Wiggins, played in the NBA, and your mom, Marita Payne-Wiggins, was an Olympic sprinter; and your first YouTube mixtape (since viewed 4.8 million times) proclaims you the “Best 13-Year-Old in the Nation.” So when NBA commissioner Adam Silver called his name and Wiggins walked across the Barclays Center stage in a black-and-silver floral-print blazer last summer, it was almost anti-climactic. Even now, with a two-year, $11.3-million rookie contract in hand, Wiggins seems happy to be here, but he’s not surprised. “I have no complaints,” he says. “I’m doing what I love to do, what I wanted to do since I was a young kid.”

But the certainty of his arrival had an unexpected side effect. While the basketball world was in a hurry for Wiggins to appear as a fully formed rival for James and Kevin Durant, the kid they nicknamed “Maple Jordan” was on his own time, with the approval of his parents. “They just let me enjoy my childhood,” says Wiggins. “They let me go with the flow, whether I wanted to play basketball or other stuff, it was fine.” In other words, the NBA rookie’s path to superstardom is on schedule, but the schedule is his.

Keeping his circle tight and seeing the big picture has always been Wiggins’s buffer against outside expectations. Nearly the entire Wiggins family has taken up residence in Minneapolis—Mom, Dad and their two youngest daughters have recently been joined by the eldest son, Mitch Jr., who just finished playing at Southeastern University; while Andrew, his oldest sister, Stephanie—how many 19-year-olds describe living with their older sister as a “joy”?—and a friend from home share their own place. Only middle son Nick Wiggins, plying his trade in the NBDL for the Idaho Stampede, is outside the immediate family orbit. But being close and hovering are two different things. “The only thing Mitch says to us is ‘Keep pushing him, keep making him do the things he needs to do,’” says Mitchell. “Mitch has never pulled one of us aside and given us a suggestion about how to coach Andrew. Mitch understands.”

The former Raptors head coach is part of what is a tight web of familiar, trusted faces in Minneapolis. Mitchell played in the NBA with and against Mitch Sr. and in Minnesota for head coach and director of basketball operations Flip Saunders when the team was nurturing Kevin Garnett, its last teenaged superstar. Minnesota’s colour man, Jim Petersen, was also a teammate of Mitch Sr. in Houston and was the first basketball client of Wiggins’s agent, Bill Duffy, who played with Saunders at the University of Minnesota. Meanwhile, T-Wolves GM Milt Newton starred at Kansas, where Wiggins played his one year of college basketball. The result is a cozy environment of people committed to what is best for Wiggins’s long-term development.

It’s been a welcome oasis. The high-profile rookie’s introduction to the business of basketball came when he spent his first professional summer in limbo. Though he was drafted by Cleveland, the Cavaliers’ plans changed when James decided to come home and the team decided winning a title would be best achieved with the help of then-Timberwolves all-star forward Kevin Love, rather than by waiting for Wiggins to develop. The trade took nearly two months to be finalized. Wiggins went with the flow. “I just gave in to it and figured I’d be good wherever I go, as long as I do what I do best,” says Wiggins of his first professional snub. “The whole thing has worked out. [Minnesota has] put me in a situation where I can grow a lot more than on the team that drafted me.”

It’s also meant that Wiggins has very much been cast as a franchise player, with the outsized expectations that come along with that role. Internally, there’s an understanding that the biggest factor in Wiggins’s development will be time. “We’d all like to fast-forward him about a year and 15 pounds,” says Saunders. “But he’s 19, so you’re working with it.”

Externally, it’s meant that Wiggins, halfway through his rookie season, has already experienced being a bust. As Christmas approached Wiggins was in the midst of what was—statistically at least—a miserable rookie season for a much-hyped No. 1 pick. The T-Wolves—ravaged by injuries to key players Ricky Rubio, Kevin Martin and Nikola Pekovic—were 5-21 and Wiggins seemed unready for prime time. It took him six games to get his first NBA dunk. Possession after possession would go by, and he would seem to let them—“Wasted minutes,” Saunders called them. Was Wiggins indeed too passive? The analytics site FiveThirtyEight ran projections based on the first quarter of Wiggins’s first NBA season and likened him to veteran journeyman James Posey rather than James. The traditional stats were unimpressive—a pedestrian 12 points a game on 38-percent shooting with more turnovers than assists—but Wiggins’s advanced statistical profile looked even worse as he ranked near the bottom of the NBA in various efficiency measures and even fared poorly in comparisons against other teenaged NBA rookies over the years.

And then Wiggins played

LeBron. The NBA regular season is long and grinding, and Wiggins isn’t immune to the demands. “Time management, the travel, the fatigue of all of it,” he says. But every once in a while the schedule provides a gift, and on Dec. 23 it was a date with the Cavaliers in Cleveland. Wiggins’s outward calm can throw people off, but he has a fiery side and playing against the team that snubbed him brought it out. “Anyone who has been traded from one team, when you face that team, you want to have a big game,” he says. “You want to show up.”

Wiggins showed up. On consecutive possessions he drained a three in LeBron’s face and dunked on Love. He abused Kyrie Irving in the post. He finished with 27 points and sent his first NBA message. What happened next, though, is what really matters. Walking off the floor, an assistant coach—it might have been Mitchell, Wiggins says, but he can’t be sure—put it in plain terms: “He said, ‘Any player can do it one night, but a great player does it every night,’” Wiggins recalls. “I’ve heard that before, but that time it stuck with me. I want to be great. I want to get the most out of my abilities.”

And thus began the second act of Wiggins’s rookie season, the one that is poised to make the first 22 games an afterthought and will earn him rookie-of-the-year honours in a walk. He followed up his outburst against Cleveland with a stretch of six straight 20-point games, a franchise rookie record and a level of consistency matched only by James and Carmelo Anthony as teenagers. By the time he put up a career-high 31 against Denver on Jan. 17, he’d topped the 20-point mark 10 times in 13 games, and he carried on to score in double digits for 22 straight. He was a consistent threat in the post against smaller players, and he was blowing by bigger ones on the perimeter. Most impressive was that, left alone, Wiggins was showing signs of being a legitimate three-point threat. At the other end, his length and quickness were posing problems for some of the NBA’s best, from Russell Westbrook to James Harden.

And as if to prove the whole thing wasn’t a fluke, he saved his best for the Cavaliers’ visit to Minnesota on Jan. 31, an occasion fraught with tension given it was Love’s first game back in Minneapolis after forcing the Timberwolves’ hand on the trade. Like in a lot of markets outside the NBA’s glamour belt, those kinds of moments cut deeply. Love, a three-time all-star in Minnesota, predicted he’d be booed, and he was—loudly and enthusiastically during pre-game introductions and every time he touched the ball. The only louder noise from the rare sellout crowd? The cheers for Wiggins when he was the last T-Wolves player introduced.

He justified the cheers quickly with an early triple, and scored 12 first-quarter points to James’s eight. By the second, James had been alerted to the challenge and the duel was on. At one point, he created room for himself in the post by snapping Wiggins’s head back with an elbow. At the other end the rookie put his shoulder into James’s chest, forced his way into the lane and got a bucket of his own. Shrink from the moment? Wiggins revelled in it. “I love the big stage,” he says. “I love playing in the spotlight in front of big crowds. I feel like that’s motivation for everyone.”

Afterwards came the respect: “He’s a great talent,” James said to reporters in the visiting locker room. “He’s really calm. He played the game the right way tonight. He didn’t make many mistakes. I don’t know, as a rookie you expect that, but I think he’s grown each month of the season. They got a good piece.”

In Minnesota, they’ve seen it coming. Even when he struggled, they saw a willing student going over game tape with coaches on the team charter—an elite athlete who flashed an advanced basketball IQ, easily picking up schemes on the fly. A big-name rookie can sometimes rankle veterans, but Wiggins’s laid-back nature meant he fit in easily. His sneaky sense of humour helps, too. In Rubio’s first game back from injury against Dallas, he threw a high lob on the break that Wiggins made look routine. “I asked if it was too high,” says Rubio. “He said, ‘Too low.’”

We’re accustomed to stars craving attention, but Wiggins doesn’t seek it, or at least seeks it only on his terms. He’ll be at All-Star Weekend in New York as part of the Rising Stars Challenge, but passed on the star-making dunk contest. “I just felt like this wasn’t my year,” he says. Next year when the All-Star Game is in Toronto? “I don’t know,” he says, laughing.

Meanwhile, an old head like Mitchell long ago recognized the value of Wiggins’s calm demeanour in a league where constant scrutiny can chip away at peace of mind, and getting caught up in the highs and lows has prevented a lot of good players from reaching their potential. From his seat on the sidelines prior to the second Cavs game, Mitchell was holding court, as usual. There were no gauntlets being thrown at Wiggins’s feet this time—the game was big enough on its own. Mitchell saw Wiggins go through his pre-game routine with fellow rookie Zach LaVine and assistant coach Ryan Saunders, and the video work that follows, and nodded approvingly. “That’s what I like about him. This shit is not over his head,” says Mitchell. “Everyone else is freaking out—‘It’s a big game, it’s LeBron James, it’s Kevin Love, and you’re Andrew Wiggins and you’re the No. 1 pick and they traded you’—and he’s sitting in there saying, ‘I’m Andrew Wiggins and I got a game tonight.’ He puts it in his proper place and he just plays. The guys who are going to be really good have the ability to do that.”

That doesn’t mean he won’t falter, of course. Despite all of Mitchell’s pre-game urging, a few nights later versus Miami, Wiggins looked like a rookie playing 50 games in a season for the first time in his life. He was held to just six points, his streak of double-figure games halted. There were times when it looked like he could have put his imprint on the game, but he didn’t. Like all great performers, he leaves you wanting more. But if he’s proving anything in his first year in the NBA, it’s that he has more to give. Wiggins said he never doubted himself when he started slowly, and he hasn’t gotten carried away by the ups and downs that have followed. “I’m always confident in myself and I know it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” he says. “What I do in the first couple of games of my career is not going to affect where my career ends up or what I accomplish. I’m 19 and I’m pretty patient.”

He’s speaking dressed in basic black, a gold-and-diamond necklace shaped in his initials his only apparent NBA indulgence. On this night he’s minutes removed from his worst game in more than a month and a few days past the best game of his career. Midway through his first season, having already struggled and thrived in noteworthy fashion, his most significant feat is that he appears unruffled by either extreme.

Photo credits: David Sherman/Getty